"

[Fans] can do anything they want with my stuff. If they want to listen to my music, or look at my art, or download a poster or a book, I say go for it.

I’m not going to get paid anyway. Do you think Warner Brothers is ever going to pay me a penny for any records I ever made, or Slash Records? I don’t get paid for those. They’re protecting the rights they own on my work so that they can make money, not that I can get paid. They don’t pay me, the laws are not in my favor. […]

It’s really difficult to get paid. So, yeah, I say, “Steal it all. Steal it all.” I make my monthly bills. I don’t care. I don’t need more than what I need. I’m not looking to be a millionaire. It would be nice if those situations weren’t corrupt.

"

Exene Cervenka, in this Phoenix New Times interview.

RFID ‘records’ for choosing music: Bertrand Fan created these RFID-tagged mini-records so his friends could choose music from his digital collection without having to scroll endlessly through files. Read more about the project here.

(via BERG Blog)

A virtual chorus, composed of videos of people all over the world.

Behind the scenes.

(Source: nest)

"The funny part is that while the Internet tends to make people feel like they’re more aware of what’s happening in music, and what “everyone” else is talking about, it’s just as effective at doing the opposite—sustaining all different kinds of huge and vibrant music worlds, to the point where whichever one you’re aware of is surely just a single weird corner among many, many more."

Arcade Fire and the ‘Never Heard of It’ Grammys

Some of the side-effects of the splintering of the musical landscape.

"I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of acoustic guitar. That grinding dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder….Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing acoustic, you’d overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as pick up and amplifier at the same time. We were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell."

From Keith Richards’ new autobiography. Quoted in this Design Observer article about innovation and disruption in music technologies, and found via the fantastic tech/culture blog Gearfuse.

"[W]e started talking about the fact that our kids listen to a lot of the same music that we do. Because music has become so flat and because there’s, you know, 50 years of it available on the web, and because you don’t actually always know when the music you like was recorded — you just know that you like it, here’s something and it’s fun — that music no longer becomes the cultural divide that it used to be…."

Neil Gaiman, quoted in this interview.

The decline of mass media and the rise of digital distribution means that music is not only splintering across audience, but it’s splintering across time; listeners are cratediggers as a matter of course.

"Everybody knows there are extremely rich people in the music business and discerning listeners have noticed that those are generally not the musicians that they like. So they don’t feel good about handing over money for a CD when it’s going to those people. But if you can see a band, buy a band’s recordings and know that there is no middle-man collecting, they can’t stop giving. They see that we’ve given and now it’s their turn to give."

Musician Kristin Hersh, from this interview with Nancy Baym.

"

The second band I started managing, called “Zero,” recorded some stuff, and we didn’t really know what to do. We weren’t going to go to a label, because it didn’t make sense. So we sat and burned about two hundred CDs. And I think at some point we realized that it would be much easier if people just burned it themselves and gave it to other people, rather than us sitting and doing this. It was really boring.

So on the other side of the CD we had instructions about how to burn it. All of that was pretty new here back then [India, c. 2000]. So we explained this is what you do: get a CD writer, find a friend, buy a blank CD for just 20 rupees, and give it away. Just make sure that they burn another copy and give it to someone else.

We took a lot of pride in that. And the more we asked people to do that, the more people ended up buying the album, which was really strange. We did the first two hundred albums like that, but we were actually mass-printing albums after that. We did about eight to ten thousand copies by the end of the year.

"

Fantastic interview with TED Fellow Vijay Nair on the emergent independent (and non-Bollywood) music industry in India. Don’t miss the killer final paragraph.

View high resolution

Playbutton is a wearable album: the lovechild of the iPod shuffle, Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony, and all those band buttons pinned your bag when you were a kid.

"As much as I detest the expression, it goes without saying that music lives at Hack Day and dies in the sinking coffin that is every major label (including those that are finally, reluctantly employing these technologies). But if you need further evidence, consider that SoundCloud and Echo Nest are hiring like mad, while the last three A&Rs who tried to sign your band are squeegeeing soiled stalls at Peep World. Meanwhile, the geniuses they once called thieves spent Saturday night at Echo Nest’s Davis Square offices partying with Javelin and toasting the wacky notion that sharing is a more effective strategy than suing."

From Chris Faraone’s roundup of last weekend’s Music Hack Day, in the Boston Phoenix.

"[A] lot of the future that we’re going to have to contend with is sitting in someone’s research lab right now. And, by simply going around and looking in the right places you can get a tremendous idea of the kind of things that are going to happen."

From “Predicting the Future,” a talk by Alan Kay, one of the founding principals of Xerox PARC, 

This pretty much sums up why I follow the Music Hack Days.

Kay also said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Not Peter Drucker. And not, for heaven’s sake, Abraham Lincoln. Why does everything get attributed to Lincoln?)

"There are going to be far fewer skyscrapers in the music business and many, many more squat buildings that are filled with purpose."

Jeff Castelaz, Dangerbird Records

Quoted in the LA Times, “LA’s string of indie labels succeeds with a jack-of-all-trades approach.”